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JONESTOWN: THE SURVIVORS’ STORY

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Russell Banks keeps the snapshots in a small brown paper bag. In one picture, his wife is smiling, a blue bandana around her short Afro. She holds their baby in one arm. Her other arm is around Banks's brother. Behind them, in a green dashiki, holding their 2‐yearold daughter, stands Banks himself. In the background is the jungle.

He remembers his daughter waving goodbye to him at the airstrip at Port Kaituma, five miles from the settlement in Guyana called Jonestown. It was Nov. 17, 1978. “ ‘Bye, Daddy,” she called. The scene appears to him in his dreams, he says — his daughter, “at a distance, waving.”

As the plane carrying Banks the 115 miles to Georgetown took off, another plane bearing Congressman Leo Ryan was coming in. The California Democrat was investigating the People's Temple of Disciples of Christ because of complaints by relatives of some of its members. The temple, established by the Rev. Jim Jones as a model of brotherly love, had prospered in San Francisco where it nourished the poor, body and soul. But now there were charges that it had become, in its new locale, a cult complete with beatings for the disobedient. A day later, the Congressman and four other men with him would be slain, and 913 men, women and children would die after drinking a concoction made of Kool‐Aid and cyanide. Banks was one of only 85 members of the temple who survived.

Today is the first anniversary of that massacre, a day that Russell Banks and the other surviving members of the Rev. Jim Jones's jungle community have dreaded. Banks, for example, lost his wife, his mother, his two brothers and his two daughters. He lost hundreds of friends and colleagues, the leader he chose to follow and the cause he believed in. He lost all his money, all his belongings — and, he lost a dream about paradise, where the toucan birds would float in the shadows and all people would be created equal. It is an anniversary of agony.

Beyond that, however, the survivors have new, painful memories and new kinds of fears. They remember the physical hardships they suffered upon their return to this country, for example — the lack of food and housing and financial support. And they remember the emotional trauma that led one member to (Continued on Page 129) commit suicide and so many others to consider it.

Moreover, the survivors feared the approach of the anniversary as an occasion when they would be pursued by the news media and their identities as Jonestown members made public. In the past, that has led to ugly incidents and the loss of jobs. For that reason, a pseudonym has been used to guard the real identity of “RussellBanks.”

Many of the survivors have refused to speak with reporters. They convey the sense that the tragedy was so extreme that to speak of it would be not cathartic but simply destructive. “Even the thought of talking to you has brought it all back,” said one woman over the telephone. “My husband is having flashbacks of the children. We had five. They are all dead.” Those who do agree to be interviewed say they are willing to discuss the last year, but not Jonestown—until the interview actually takes place, that is. Then, they seem unable to stop talking about the events of that Saturday night in Guyana, the events that have become the real focus of their lives.

No one at the hospital where Russell Banks works knows of his Jonestown connection; the new friends he has made think he was in San Francisco last year. He is 24 years old, and he lives in a large city in a black neighborhood. Taxi drivers call it “The Jungle.”

Banks was the medical technician in that other jungle occupied by the community called Jonestown. He was assigned by Jim Jones to accompany four injured members to Georgetown for medical treatment. The People's Temple owned a large cement house there that served as a permanent residence for a handful of members and as a kind of hotel for visitors from Jonestown having business in the country's capital. Russell speaks of Georgetown as “an old country town with no fog and the smell of the sea.”

On the night of Nov. 18, Banks walked to the local movie house with two friends, Paul McCann and Guy Mitchell, and returned to the house at about 11. P.M. It was surrounded by police and soldiers.

“We were totally, totally amazed,” Banks recalls. The guards had submachine guns, automatic rifles, every manner of weapon. “A lot of our people were standing outside in the cold, in their bathrobes, like they were being searched. The radio was cut off to Jonestown. We weren't told what was happening for hours, hours, hours.”

But Banks and the others had a premonition. They remembered the drills that Jim Jones had put temple members through, practice sessions in mass suicide looking toward what he called the “white night.” Banks says that “the first look at the house sent chills through us because of the fantasy about what might have happened.” He asked those standing outside to explain. “They said, ‘Shhh, shhh,’ and they were crying, and they had such long faces it looked like the end of the world. … Then someone told me that Sharon and Martin and Crystal and Lee Anne were upstairs with their throats slit.”

Charles Beikman, a temple member who is being held in a Georgetown jail, has been charged with the murder of Sharon Amos and her three children. However, Banks says he heard a different version from other survivors. They told of seeing Sharon Amos take a butcher knife out of the kitchen and call her children to follow her into the bathroom; and they said that this occurred shortly after she had spoken to Jim Jones on the short‐wave radio. “I was just hoping,” Banks says, “that maybe she went insane”—anything would be better than what he feared, that she was responding to word of a white night in Jonestown.

“When I found out, when I first found out, it was the end of the world for me. Everybody I had known my whole life, my whole career, everything that had meaning, all of a sudden, gone.” But Banks wasn't to know the full extent of his loss at first. Tim Jones, an adopted son of Jim Jones, and Johnny Cobb, a member of the basketball team, flew into Jonestown Sunday with a group of Guyanese soldiers to identify bodies; when they returned, they told Banks they'd seen no sign of his family. The early reports indicated a death toll of about 300.

“I had been waiting a whole day for them to get back. You know, I felt a kind of sigh of relief. I thought, ‘Hey, I know my wife.’ She had talked about trying to get away all the time. I figured she took the opportunity and left with the children.” But it was a cruel illusion. The body count rose hourly, reaching 900, “and from then on all we did was cry until we couldn't cry anymore.”

The survivors were kept in Georgetown for about a month, in the temple's house or in a hotel called the Park.

“They told us that they weren't letting us out of Guyana, that they were going to send the women first and then they were going to send the men a week later. We figured what they were going to do was send us on this plane and then blow it up…. The C.I.A., the F.B.I., the police — if the people back here [in Guyana] didn't take care of us, then they would.”

When the group of survivors boarded the plane, they were accompanied by armed guards. Banks remembers it angrily: “We were … we were … we were the victims. We weren't the criminals. We had relatives who died, who died over there. We were being treated like a bunch of common criminals, like we were going to take over the plane and kill somebody.” After landing in New York, he says, the group was led to a hanger where members were each assigned two Federal agents, taken into individual Winnebago vans and questioned (Banks says “grinded”) for hours.

Banks says that his passport was confiscated by the State Department. Several State Department staffers said that this was not standard procedure, though they said that they didn't know whether it had happened in this case. They added that the passports of the survivors had been stamped to indicate that they were valid only for the return trip to the United States and thus, in effect, already“canceled.” Why the stamp? Because citizens being repatriated are not allowed to leave the country again without paying the cost of their repatriation — in Banks's case, the $349 for the plane flight from Guyana to New York.

When he returned to the West Coast, Banks lived in a one‐bedroom apartment with his alcoholic father, his sister and her three children. He went on welfare for a while (after forcing himself to fill out “12 pages of forms”) but eventually found a hospital willing to hire a trained medical technician, without asking too many questions. He makes $900 a month, which enables him to help support his father, who works as a waiter, and his sister, who is on welfare. He is taking night courses at a local community college to meet the enrollment requirements for a training program that will prepared him for the job of physician's assistant.

“In my psychology class,” Banks says, “my instructor was talking about how the Jonestown people were a bunch of kooks … brainwashed … people looking for someone to identify with or had something missing out of their lives. A lot of people had something missing out of their lives, that was true, but because of that we wanted to help other people … to come together and put all those missing parts together and make one big piece of happiness.” Banks doesn't think that adds up to being “kooky,” and he says the instructor “made me want to stand up and say, ‘Hey, look. I just came from there, and I knew those people.’ “

Most of the 85 persons who survived the massacre had been in Georgetown the night of the poisoning. The basketball team, for example, was in the capital to play a game. Its members, some of whom were adopted sons of Jim Jones, served him as a kind of security force and were accorded special stature in the community. There were some 15 persons, who called themselves “concerned relatives,” who traveled to Guyana with Ryan. They, too, are counted as survivors, though most of them remained in Georgetown and never got to Jonestown. The only child to survive was Stephanie Jones, 9 years of age, who was very nearly slain by whoever killed Sharon Amos's children. Stephanie's throat bears a scar that goes from ear to ear. Sixteen defectors from Jonestown were on the airstrip with Congressman Ryan when his party was attacked, and all but one surSome few members survived who had actually been in Jonestown on the night of Nov. 18. One was an elderly woman who slept through it all. Another, a schoolteacher, was sent to get a stethoscope by the Jonestown doctor during the actual mass suicide but chose instead to escape into the jungle.

A year after the fabric of their lives was destroyed, most of the 85 survivors are working or going to school. A man who escaped through the jungle during the white night works in a travel agency in Idaho. A defector who was caught on the airstrip with Congressman Ryan makes a living driving a truck in the state of Washington; his wife works in a hospital caring for terminally ill patients.

Most of the survivors stayed in San Francisco, home of the original dream. It was here that they had run the free soup kitchen and the day‐care center and the carpentry shop, here they had filled the buses that Jim Jones could mobilize for a rally in behalf of Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter or a demonstration in sup. port of jailed newsmen. “We were powerful when we stepped out of those buses,” says Jeannie Mills, who wrote “Six Years with God” after her defection from the temple in 1977. “We couldn't do anything wrong.”

The survivors work in the booming electronics plants south of the city or in nursing homes or as janitors. Those few on welfare are physically or emotionally disabled or are elderly — and there seems to be a special kind of pride in this group. One senior citizen speaks of having taken “a leadership role” in his nursing home.

What makes this record particularly impressive is the fact that all of the needs of these men and women had previously been met in a communa! setting where much of the business of life was taken care of by others. Many, for example, had not balanced a checkbook in five years. Members were expected to turn over their assets to the church, one of the main sources of its substantial treasury. Moreover, the temple removed any need for individual decision making; any questions were answered by one man.

Their motivation, some of them suggest, can be found in their dire poverty; it forces them to keep working with little time to think about the past. But Jeannie Mills offers another explanation.

“People in the temple were ‘We don't give nearly as much attention as we should to diverse forms of talent,’ an E.T.S. official said. ‘But then, most admissions directors have been content to go along with a relatively narrow definition of academic ability.’

Hard workers,” she says. “Our experience in the temple made us strong. It made our children independent. We learned to live on very little. We learned to get happiness from watching a bird flying overhead. We learned to accept people confronting us. To stand and face a crowd. There were very, very good things we learned. It was important for me to accept these things, as well as the horrible things, in order to own my own life.”

Hundreds of members committed suicide on Nov. 18, but among the survivors of Jonestown, only one person has taken his own life since that time. On the night of the massacre, Michael Prokes, a former newsman who became the temple's public relations person, and two other members dragged a suitcase containing between $500,000 and S1 million through the jungle until it became too heavy to carry and they buried it. (The Guyana Government has since found the money and held onto it. A survivor has said that the funds were intended to pay for death contracts on Jones's enemies, in the event of his death.) Last March, Prokes held a press conference at which he released a 40‐page memorandum he had written. The session was in a Modesto, Calif., motel, and at one point of the proceedings he walked into a men's room and shot himself.

Prokes's lawyer, Jerrold M. Ladar, feels that the memo contained some hints to explain the suicide. “He felt that Jim Jones was being vilified,” Ladar says. “In the memo he stressed how important the tapes made of Jones's last hours would be. He wanted those tapes released to the public, and maybe he thought he could compel their release by this dramatic act.” In fact, NBC‐TV was already preparing to release some of the audiotapes; they were aired on the Today Show the day after his death.

Other survivors have contemplated suicide, according to Dr. Chris Hatcher, a psychologist at Langley Porter Institute, the psychiatric branch of the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Hatcher, chairman of the Mayor's Committee on the Family, was asked by Mayor Dianne Feinstein to head the city's efforts to deal with the Jonestown survivors.

During the two‐day auction in March of the People's Temple building in San Francisco and its contents, ordered by the Superior Court, Dr. Hatcher received a number of telephone calls from survivors for whom “suicide was a real issue.” Many of the items sold had been given to the temple by its members, and there were former members at the auction bidding on their own handmade rugs or on a tea service that had once belonged to a relative, now dead in Guyana.

According to another psychiatrist, the survivors have not followed their self‐destructive tendencies because Jim Jones did not believe in individual suicide.

By her own admission, suicide was a very real option for Bea Orsot. She was a member of the temple for eight years, the last of them in Jonestown. She remembers those years as “the happiest of my life, up until the very last second.”

She is a thin, high‐strung woman, 53 years of age, who chain‐smokes Merit cigarettes, sometimes two at a time. She lives rent‐free with another former temple member, a woman who was not in Jonestown, in a neighborhood of San Francisco where almost every face on the street is black.

“If I had been there, I would have been the first one to stand in that line and take that poison and I would have been proud to take it,” says Bea Orsot. “The thing that I'm sad about is this: that I missed the ending.”

How did it happen? “Are you ready for this? I had to go to the dentist. Some say it's a blessing. I say it's the worst thing that ever happened. I wanted to die with my friends. I wanted to do whatever they wanted to do. Be alive or dead.”

Bea Orsot grew up in Savannah, Ga., and after her mother's death, she was lonely little girl; she used to write letters to God, asking for “a real mother, someone to talk to, someone to understand me.” One of those letters she hid in a chimney and kept the secret to herself. Years later, when she joined the People's Temple, the Rev. Jim Jones told her about the letter and where it was hidden.

She believes that Jim Jones cured her of a tumor. She remembers the time she broke her ankle and couldn't work and Jim Jones paid the rent. She remembers that when he spoke to the congregation, it was always as if he was speaking directly to her. She has a photo album filled with pictures of Jim Jones.

“I miss him, yes. I miss 913 people, yes. … I never had to worry about growing old alone.”

She thinks the C.I.A. had something to do with what happened in Jonestown. She thinks that some day the people who died there will be viewed as saints. As for Jones, himself: “I know that the decision he made was a good decision he had to make that would benefit the greatest number of people for the greatest good.”

In the first days back, she lived with her son and his family. She watched television. She had been a well‐trained secretary who had at one point worked for the Internal Revenue Service, but now she would sit and stare at the wall for hours. She started smoking again after 10 years of abstinence. She began to jot her thoughts down on little pieces of paper until she had a shoe box full, and she started writing a book. The title: “The World Did Not Giveth and The World Cannot Taketh Away.”

Bea Orsot still says she's “not all that happy” about being back in this country. She speaks of “that terrible first year” when she was suddenly alone. “I have thought of killing myself many times. But I won't do it now. I've gotten past that stage.”

She now works part time for Charles Garry, the former attorney for the temple, and thus need not worry that public exposure would cause her to lose her job. She has used her salary to buy a used camper. Every weekend she drives to the ocean and writes her book.

At first, the survivors stayed together, as many as 12 adults living in a onebedroom apartment. And the Center for Human Freedom, a 13‐room building in Berkeley, which was established by Jeannie Mills and her husband, Al, as a refuge for defectors, became a kind of half‐way house for some returning Jonestown refugees.

Financial need was a major reason for such banding together; loneliness and fear played their part, as well. After the massacre, crowds stood outside the temple in San Francisco shouting “baby killers.” In fact, the survivors were never physically attacked; they were exposed, instead, to another kind of punishment.

Officials in welfare offices and at food‐stamp locations sometimes refused to speak to those who had returned from Jonestown. Survivors found that doors once open to them had been firmly shut. One man won back his old job as a produce manager for a large supermarket chain only by retaining a lawyer to force the company to hire him.

Dr. Hatcher describes a typical case history: “We had a man who went down to an auto dealership to apply for a job. He had several interviews. The men who talked to him liked him. Then came time for his final interview with the sales manager. This man noticed that there were blanks on his application form where ‘previous occupation’ was supposed to be filled in. The survivor told him he had been a member of the People's Temple. The sales manager stood up, tore the application in half and said, ‘I'm going to do something I have never done. I'm going to throw you out of this office.’ “

Often the connection with Jonestown took its toll in more intimate ways. For example, when The San Francisco Examiner printed some pictures taken by their photographer, Greg Robinson, slain on the airstrip with Congressman Ryan, the children of temple members in San Francisco were teased in school. Says Russell Banks: “I don't tell anybody about it. Maybe if I get married again. Maybe I'll tell her after we're engaged. Or maybe after we're married.”

By and large, the survivors returned to a nation that looked upon them with revulsion. There was little or no concern about their needs, litttle interest in helping them. Finally, Dr. Hatcher went to Washington and “begged on the Federal doorstep for disaster funds.” He had little success at first: “People from the top down said, ‘Not at this time.’ I went everywhere, including the White House. They weren't interested.”

An exception was Dr. Saul Feldman, director of the staff college at the National Institute of Mental Health. “It is often hard to know who should worry about what in a bureaucracy,” he says. “But we recognized a special need and did what we could.”

N.I.M.H. came up with a $26,000 grant, which is being used primarily to hire three survivors, part time, to help the few survivors who seek welfare and disability aid and to assist senior members in getting to and from medical appointments. The institutes also paid travel expenses for two visits to California by Dr. Hardat Sukhdeo, a Guyana‐born, American‐trained psychiatrist.

Dr. Sukhdeo is deputy chairman for clinical services and chief of psychiatry at the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Jersey School of Medicine. He is about to surrender these posts, however, to devote himself full time to research, on cults. When he heard of the massacre at Jonestown, Dr. Sukhdeo flew back to his native Guyana, at his own expense, because, he says, he felt he could help out. He is very critical of the manner in which the survivors have been treated:

“All the governmental agencies are interested in is that these people don't make trouble for them. They don't mind them killing themselves, as long as they don't kill anyone else. They are treating them like dead bodies: don't put them here, we don't want them here.

“They were taken back and deposited back into the community. No thought was given to disentangling their minds from the teachings of Jones. A group of people who were so heavily indoctrinated to the point where 900 killed themselves are told, ‘Now go back and live your life.’ “

Dr. Sukhdeo tells of a young woman who “never realized she was under ‘mind control’ until she returned. She found herself doing everything her relatives told her to do. She would eat whether she wanted to or not. She would think: why am I eating this food? And it gradually came to her: when you're under mind control, you never really know it.”

During the course of any given week, Dr. Sukhdeo conducts a kind of long‐distancetelephone therapy with at least 10 survivors. When he visited the West Coast, he attempted to organize group therapy sessions, but it was too difficult for the survivors, who were reminded of group meetings in Jonestown.

Dr. Sukhdeo did meet with survivors informally at the Center for Human Freedom, which Jeannie Mills has now had to close down for lack of funds.

Two factors have worked against the efforts of doctors to understand and guide the survivors. One is Jim Jones's teaching that psychiatry is nonsense. The other is their belief that sessions with a mental‐health counselor are tantamount to admitting the very insanity with which the world has labeled them.

The only other organized effort to aid the survivors was made by a black minister of the Pentecostal Church. He raised $607, which he turned over to the San Francisco Council of Churches. The council still has the money because, according to its executive director, Donndter Lane, there does not seem an appropriate organization to give it to.

There is another, very different group of survivors. Charles Garry, for example, had been the temple's attorney. Portraits of clients Bobby Seale and Huey Newton adorn Garry's office walls, along with a collage of pictures from Jonestown: an old black man wearing a plantation hat with a feather in the band is placed next to a photo of a bunch of grinning children. The words of Martin Luther King are written beside the photos: “I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. I have a dream today.”

Garry and attorney Mark Lane, who has made a career of following conspiracy theories, were in Jonestown the night of Nov. 18. Lane had been invited by Jim Jones, without Garry's knowledge. They escaped death together by convincing the guards that someone had to “tell the world about Jonestown,” and they spent the night together in the jungle. But they have been together on very little since.

According to Garry, Lane was “the catalyst, part of the catalyst” in the events leading to the massacre. Garry says that Lane, “behind my back, proceeded to, beginning in September, when he was there, to tell them they were being persecuted. That the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., whatever, all of the intelligence forces, were out to destroy them. And that he himself was going to be the person who was going to stop all that.” By reinforcing Jones's fears, Garry says, Lane contributed to an atmosphere in which the white night could occur.

Garry points out that his office is “not a novice” when it comes to taking a hard look at the conduct of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. To determine whether a conspiracy existed, he says, he filed 1,400 requests for information — one for every member of the temple—with 20 Government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act. He claims that the Government turned up nothing that would suggest a conspiracy beyond a file containing copies of letters that Jim Jones had sent complaining of harassment by one agency or another.

Efforts over a three‐week period to reach Mark Lane at his office in Memphis, Ala., for a response to Garry's accusations were unsuccessful, and he failed to return any calls.

Another in the special group of survivors is Jackie Speier, Ryan's aide, who was horribly wuunded in the attack on the Congressman at the Port Kaituma airstrip.

“Plaintiff suffered … great physical and mental pain and great bodily injuries,” reads the complaint for damages against the People's Temple, “consisting of, among other things, but not limited to, severe bullet wounds to the plaintiff's body and particularly right arm, pelvis, back and legs; lacerations, breaking, rupture and other injuries to the muscles, tendons, bones and ligaments of, and bruises, contusions, injuries, scars and bullet wounds to and on her right arm, pelvis, back, right hip and legs; that a bullet remains lodged in her pelvis….”

She begins the interview by talking about the scars: there are 65 stitches on the right leg. They appear as deep, red welts. There are several more scars on the left leg, three inches wide, eight inches long, where skin was removed for skin grafts. There are three scars on the right arm. There is the bullet in the pelvis, unremovable, which the doctors assure her will not interfere with childbirth. But she wonders, “How many studies have they done on women with bullets in their pelvis?”

She has not recovered from the emotional impact of the fusillade of bullets that struck her. When some children set off a string of firecrackers in the courtyard of her apartment building, she collapsed. In April, a memorial service for Ryan in San Mateo, his home town, concluded with an unexpected 21 gun salute. “I crumpled,” she says. “I was on that airstrip again. I broke down. A guard had to hold me up.”

Jackie Speier sought the Democratic nomination to run for Ryan's vacant Congressional seat last March but lost. She took it well, her friends say, but it was shortly thereafter that a grim depression set in. She would be standing at the ironing board in her kitchen when the airstrip would appear before her. “I would wonder, ‘Why didn't it end? Why am I taking the next breath when I know how it can end? Why was I spared? Why not Leo? He had so much to give. Why not save him?’ “

She found, as she puts it, that her “priorities” had changed. Packing her clothes in Washington after the failed campaign, she found herself “packing the clothes of a stranger.” She wondered why she had ever needed so many dresses.

She returned to California, and she set about shopping for office furniture for her second bedroom. Once that was accomplished, the depression lifted. “Roots,” she says, laughing. “What I needed was roots.” Now she is working on a local campaign for a woman candidate, writing a book about Jonestown and doing a great deal of public speaking. (In her speeches she holds that the courts are construing the First Amendment too broadly, making it possible for religion to be used to cloak illegal activities.) She wears longsleeved shirts and skirts because pants nib against the scars and make them ache.

Larry Layton has been accused of gunning down Leo Ryan, Jackie Speier and the others in their party at the airstrip. A conscientious objector, Layton was doing C.O. duty at a mental institution in Mendocino County when he first attended People's Temple meetings. He became one of Jim Jones's closest aides.

The slender, 33‐year‐old Layton has spent the last year in a Georgetown jail. In letters to his father in California, he tells of being kept apart from other prisoners for his own safety, of being in a cell where it is too dark to read, of being plagued by mosquitoes.

Hearings in Layton's case have been scheduled and then canceled because of technical flaws. He has been charged with conspiracy, but proof of such a charge may be difficult. As his attorney has said, “The people with whom Layton may have conspired — they are all dead.”

Six hundred and eighty‐five claims, seeking a total of $1.7 billion, make for a fat file in the clerk's office of San Francisco's Superior Court. Number 752772, for instance: “Issac Edwards vs. People's Temple of the Disciples of Christ, the estate of Rev. Jim Jones, the estate of Marceline Jones…. Complaint for damages for wrongful death,” of his child, Issac Jr., 6 years of age, and his wife, Shirley Ann, 27 years of age. The plaintiffs claim that the defendant “maliciously breached their duty to protect the life and physical well being of decedents Issac and Shirley” who sustained “disruption of neural function, disruption of brain function and untimely death.” Damages sought : $5 million.

But who will pay? Where will the funds come from? Judge Ira Brown, in whose court this matter lies, said at a hearing in October that some of the money may be in Panama or Guyana. “It would be fortunate if we got $10 million,” the judge said with a sigh. The sale of the People's Temple building brought in $300,000, and the auction of its contents another $75,000.

Earlier this year, Judge Brown ordered the release of $335,000 out of the $700,000 in the San Francisco bank account of the temple, to pay for the return and burial of the bodies from Jonestown. But no graveyards are allowed in San Francisco. And officials of affluent Marin County indicated they had no desire to have their cemetery become a cult shrine or tourist attraction. Eventually, the bodies were buried across the bay on the outskirts of Oakland.

A version of this archives appears in print on November 18, 1979, on Page SM19 of the New York edition with the headline: JONESTOWN: THE SURVIVORS’ STORY. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe